School Play (BBC TV) Coming Soon.
School Play
was a single drama broadcast by BBC
TV in November 1979 that seems to have
vanished completely since.
I’m pleased to say that I have been given
a copy of the full play and will be uploading scenes from it over the coming
(2024) Christmas holidays.
The play, written by Frederic
Raphael, is based on his experiences as a boy
at Charterhouse
School in the late 1940s and early 1950s. All the schoolboys are played by
adult actors.
In an interview still available on
YouTube Raphael says it’s about a bunch of
people at a public school who never leave. They get older and older in the
House and they become monitors and various other things, but they never leave
school.
He says the play was directed as if it
were a ‘revenge on Charterhouse’.
He goes on, ‘And the BBC showed it and it
was a great success. That’s to say, lots of people watched it and it got very
good reviews, but they never repeated it because somebody at the BBC realised,
so they said, what I was really doing which was satirising them. I was also, of
course, satirising just about everything else that there was in England.
‘That’s what satire does, chum. But it was
not well regarded. I’ve never actually done anything for the BBC television
from that day on. So there.’
Picture credits: BBC TV
Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com
Never seen this. Should be interesting .
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